


for the touch of a vanished hand

by aurilly



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Loki used to visit Bucky during WWII, M/M, Old Friends, Reunions, Thailand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:48:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24581083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: Escaped, former assassin Bucky has been living quietly in Thailand. Then, one night, a long-lost friend returns to his life.Turns out Loki wasn't imaginary, after all.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Loki
Comments: 30
Kudos: 196
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	for the touch of a vanished hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nununununu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nununununu/gifts).



Bucky had just finished cleaning the pizza oven after a busy night when his boss, Arnaud, practically danced his way over to him. 

"Business was pretty good tonight, wasn't it?" Bucky said, in French. He wiped his sweating forehead with the sleeve of his shirt, which simply managed to get flour in his eyes. 

"It was. However, I came to say that you don't need to close tonight. I will be here for some time more, with my friends." Arnaud pointed towards the table at which sat the restaurant's only remaining customers. Hours of cheek-kissing and honking laughter had made it clear that these people and Arnaud went way back. 

Bucky had a feeling the wine fridge hidden in the office—with imports not on the menu—was about to get depleted. And possibly the people who'd pre-ordered pastries would arrive the next morning to find their orders unexpectedly 'out of stock'. 

"You sure?" Bucky asked politely. He was beat, but it was a good, healthy, mind-clearing kind of beat. He never minded staying late. Chores energized him. 

"I am very certain. Unless you would like to join us? These are my oldest friends, from Lyon, you know." Even after two years, Arnaud hadn't yet given up on his polite—and seemingly genuine—overtures of friendliness. He didn't seem to take Bucky's constant refusals the wrong way, and had come to see Bucky's shy solitude as a battle he might one day win.

"Thanks, but I've got an early morning." Bucky gave a shy wave to the table. "It was nice to meet you, though!"

"I will continue to ask until you say yes."

"I know. And… one day I will."

"A demain, then," Arnaud said through a wave of smoke.

"A demain."

With his exceptional hearing, Bucky could just make out Arnaud telling his friends, in a thicker accent than he generally allowed himself, "One day, I will break through his shell. The man is a mystery, but a surprisingly excellent pizzaiolo. One would have thought he was Neapolitan, but he is French! A credit to our nation."

"His accent sounded Marseillaise," one of the women said, and then Bucky crossed the street and heard no more. 

Even though it had been awhile, Bucky hadn't put much effort into developing his loosely assumed identity. He kept to himself mostly, so, apart from Arnaud, there was no one to fake anything with. He had passed himself off as French to apply for the job of pizzaiolo at Arnaud's French bakery-slash-pizzeria; if that hadn't worked out, he would pretended to be German for a job over at that fancy resort on Long Beach that seemed to cater only to rich Bavarians. But tonight, he added a note about Marseille to his mental file about himself. He'd never thought much about his accent, but the woman's remark brought back auditory memories of the war, when Dernier had been the one to turn the French Bucky had learned in high school into real language skills. Bucky couldn't recall whether Dernier had come from Marseille, and had a feeling that his memory, at least here, was not to blame; it may never have come up. 

A red-headed woman—one-half of a starry-eyed honeymooning couple—stepped cluelessly in front of Bucky's scooter, but other than that, he was on his way without much incident. October sat firmly enough in Koh Lanta's off-season that very few people were walking through the two-block town center. There were very few cars on the whole island, and barely even any scooters this late at night, especially on the southern half. On nights like this, Bucky enjoyed the luxury of not having to worry much. It was unlikely he'd run into anyone from Hydra on this barely touristed island. He didn't even have to worry about hyper-active little kids darting into the road.

As he sped along the moonlit edge of the bluff that rose above this stretch of the beach, Bucky basked in the calm joy that open-air driving had always given him. He was just wondering if he should have made an effort and finally taken Arnaud up on his repeated offers of socializing, when the sky lit up in flashes of pink and purple and honest-to-god fucking _sparkles_. Bucky wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes (and even then, it was debatable), but he was pretty sure he saw something sizable fall from the sky. 

It was the smell, more than even anything he had just seen, that caught his attention. Very few of the memories he'd been cataloging, in notebook after scribble-filled notebook, hinged on smell. There'd been his mother's soda bread in the oven, tomato sauce wafting out of windows in Bensonhurst, shit and terror in the trenches. However, this, this tangy, burned smell sparked a very specific memory, one from the set that had never quite fit with the rest, and whose veracity he had long questioned. Bucky had started wondering if the whole thing had been a war-inspired daydream, the kind of fantasy that lots of guys had used to get through tough times, and which his added brain now confused with reality.

The tangled web of images and emotions surrounding this smell overcame Bucky's usually ironclad self-preservation instincts. He should have minded his own business and kept heading home. However, instead of listening to his head, he followed his gut and turned around. The only way down to the beach—and the only building for a couple of miles in any direction—was through a restaurant built into the cliff-face. It had closed hours ago, but Bucky had been a whiz at breaking into places since Brooklyn. He parked his scooter out of sight, behind some brush. Within minutes, he was picking his way down through each level of the restaurant, and then down the steps that led the rest of the way to the shore. He ran to the spot where he'd seen the thing fall. 

Not a thing: a body. 

The tide brought waves to crash over the body's feet where it lay, face down. Long and thin and dressed in dark clothes, it wasn't moving. Bucky hadn't expected it to, not after a fall like that. 

He took one more look at the sky and frowned; there'd been no sign of a plane or anything in the clear night sky. 

Carefully, so that he didn't inflict any more damage, Bucky turned the body over. He steeled himself for a blood-spattered visage, but, to his surprise, there wasn't any blood. Long black hair covered the man's unmarred face. 

Before he had a chance to see anything, the man, whom Bucky had thought unconscious, suddenly lashed out. Knives appeared in his hands, out of nowhere, glinting in the moonlight. Bucky deflected the wild, desperate blows and slices with his arm, again and again, until the man changed tack. They wrestled in the sand, rolling over one another and into the waves. It had been a long time since Bucky had fought someone, much less someone he didn't want to hurt; he found that he didn't know how to hold back. However, it soon became clear that he didn't need to. Nothing he did seemed to hurt his unnaturally strong opponent; the man reacted to punches like pats. So, Bucky stopped pulling them.

The fight ended with Bucky sitting squarely on the man's chest, metal hand holding the man's wrists above his head, unyielding thighs straddling the man's ribs. With his flesh hand, Bucky finally got to brush the man's long hair from in front of his face, careful to avoid teeth that snapped like an angry turtle. 

"Loki?" Bucky whispered, questioning on five different levels. Because here, simultaneously impossible and half-expected, was the face from the wild, confusing maybe-fantasies that had led him down here in the first place. Here was the man who had always smelled like something otherworldly and exciting.

The voice, though more strained and hysterical than in Bucky's memories, rang out just as familiarly. "Who are you? I swear, I will disembowel you where you—"

"Oh, for Pete's sake," Bucky replied automatically, in a tone of exasperated fondness that he remembered, only after he heard himself say the familiar words, as the one he'd often used with Loki.

Loki stopped thrashing. He tilted his head up, as much as he was able with Bucky's bulk resting firmly across his chest, and squinted. 

Bucky gave Loki time to work it out. He knew he'd changed too much for recognition to be easy, but this was the first time Bucky had encountered anyone he'd known from before. He hadn't known until this moment how desperately he longed for someone to _see_ him, to see the man he had worked so incredibly hard to excavate. A small part of him worried that Loki wouldn't get it, wouldn't recognize him. A small part of him didn't think he deserved it. 

"Barnes?" Loki eventually asked, to Bucky's relief. And then, as though no time had passed, as though this were all perfectly normal, he followed up with, "What in the world have you done to your hair?"

"I grew it out," Bucky said flatly.

"Well, it's atrocious." 

"Thanks for the feedback." Bucky could feel himself beaming happiness, not only because Loki had recognized him, but also because of how _easy_ this all felt. Nothing about Loki being here made any sense, but it was _right_. Bucky felt sure that he could roll with it, just as he'd rolled with Loki in the memories that he could now count as real, not made-up.

The fight must have winded Loki, or else simply distracted him from the original pain of his fall, because he took a minute to get to his feet. Even when he did manage to stand, he leaned heavily on Bucky's arm, pressing much closer into Bucky's personal space than Bucky usually allowed. 

"I assume this is Midgard, then."

"Thailand," Bucky corrected.

Loki raised an eyebrow. "If you say so." 

"Are you all right?" Bucky asked after Loki crumpled into the sand at his first attempt to walk on his own. Bucky kneeled down to grip him securely under the armpit and raise him back up again. "That was quite a fall." 

"I'll live." With gritted teeth, Loki took another step. This time, with Bucky's help, he succeeded in staying upright. He held Bucky tightly, furrowing his brow at the unyielding nature of Bucky's left forearm. 

Bucky nodded upwards, towards the top of the bluff. "There's no road or exit from this beach. We have to get back up there. It'll involve breaking into the building up ahead and climbing through it to the other end. You think you're up to that?"

"I suppose I will have to be."

"I'll help you. And you've always been real tough," Bucky said, remembering, hazily, one time when Loki had shown up out of nowhere, like he always did, bored and eager to accompany him on one of the solo missions the brass had sometimes sent him on while Steve was working on other projects. When Bucky had run out of ideas on how to get into the Hydra mountain-top base, Loki had used toothy, ingratiating charm, and then, when that ran out, the most inspirational knifework Bucky had ever witnessed. Sometime during the fight, Loki had taken a bullet to the arm; looking back, Bucky should have known a regular person wouldn't have been able to keep fighting after that. However, he'd been too busy calming Loki's temper when the Tesseract proved to have been moved out of that base to notice how badly Loki had been injured. 

It was around that mission that Bucky had started to wonder if there might be more to Loki's odd stories, and if he might not actually be the British intelligence back-up Bucky had assumed the first couple of times Loki had shown up. Loki's single-minded focus on getting his hands on the cube didn't jibe with anything in Bucky's mission briefings. In fact, the only beef Loki seemed to have with Hydra was that they'd mistreated Bucky. 

Now, with a lot of effort and tripping and cursing in the strange tongue that Loki had always slipped into when he was annoyed, they climbed and swung their way, ever upwards, through the maze of balcony levels. Loki proved just as tough as Bucky remembered, going from barely walking a minute ago to the acrobatics required to reach their destination. After the last, nigh-impossible full-body swing up to the roof, Loki's strength gave out. It must have been sheer will that had kept him going. He fell rather than jumped into the road. Bucky ran to get his scooter, and rode it to stop in front of him. 

"All you have to do for this part is hold on to me," he said encouragingly. "Climb on."

"I've never liked these things," Loki complained, looking nervously at the scooter. "Do you remember that time…"

"In Austria, when your legs didn't fit in the side car. I know, you wouldn't shut up about it." Bucky laughed, not at Loki, nor even at the hilarious memory from one of the various missions on which Loki had accompanied him, but at the ongoing elation of having a friend again—at getting an old friend _back_ , someone with whom he shared any memories at all. Bucky had forgotten what it felt like to reminisce with something other than his own notebook.

This time, there was no side car. Loki wrapped his arms tightly around Bucky's waist, pressed his chest hard against Bucky's back, and rested his cheek against the back of Bucky's hair. 

Bucky covered up his shiver by starting the bike and hunching forward. No one had touched him like that in longer than he could remember. Not in the ten years since he'd escaped from Hydra. They certainly hadn't touched him like his during the sixty-odd years that he'd been the Winter Soldier. He remembered, now, with shocking and mortifying clarity, wishing for something very like this during the war—from Loki specifically. He remembered almost getting it, and being too much of an idiot to go for it.

"Where are we going?" Loki asked. "Back to your camp?"

"What?" Bucky asked. Because Loki couldn't… He couldn't think the war was still going on, could he? He couldn't have mistaken Thailand for the Western front, could he? That would have been impossible, ridiculous, even for Loki. Though, Bucky decided, it was no more impossible and ridiculous than falling out of the sky, practically at Bucky's feet, seventy years after they'd last seen one another. No more impossible and ridiculous than everything that had happened to Bucky in the intervening years. 

"I'm not in the army anymore," Bucky explained. "I've got a house here. We're not in Europe." 

Loki must have been too exhausted to ask, because all he said was, "I did think it rather warmer here. Though I am happy to hear my accommodations will be something more comfortable than a hayloft in a bombed-out village." 

Bucky remembered that night, too; he'd just been thinking about it. He felt his face go hot.

It was fortunate that Loki had decided to hold him around his ribcage. The memory of Loki's body close to his in their makeshift bed of hay that night, combined with the current sensation of being embraced, was doing things to him, embarrassing things that, in someone better adjusted and accustomed to friendly affection, would not have led to arousal. But Bucky _wasn't_ very well adjusted. He turned out to be so starved for this kind of contact that his wires got crossed. He ended up half hard in his flour-covered jeans. It took the entire ride to will his dick back into submission. 

"This is me," he said when he'd pulled into the entrance of the shabby beach bungalow complex in which he lived. Hand in hand, squeezing one another's fingers every few steps, Bucky walked Loki down the dark path to last of the little two-room houses. 

"Well, this is… horrible," Loki said when Bucky had switched on the lights to reveal the simplicity of the interior and the shabbiness of the scant furniture. "How low I have fallen. How low _you_ have fallen since last I saw you. At least the hayloft had some measure of atmosphere."

"Last time you saw me, I was calling a hole in the ground home. If I was lucky, I got to sleep in a tent with five other guys. This is paradise by comparison. Hell, this is paradise even without a comparison. Oh no you don't," Bucky interrupted himself when he saw Loki moving towards the bed. "Clothes off, shower first. You're not getting sand all over my bed."

Bucky led Loki, grumbling, to the tiny bathroom and turned on the taps for him. Bucky left as Loki began to strip, forcing himself not to look. He snagged an extra towel and went back outside to shower in the complex's communal outdoor shower. By the time he got back, Loki had finished bathing, and had put on the tee-shirt and basketball shorts Bucky had left out for him. 

Of the two of them, Bucky, wearing only a towel tied around his waist and the flesh-colored sleeve that covered his arm, was the least clothed. But he was the one who gulped; in all the images that he had guiltily touched himself to many a sleepless night, Loki remained been as overly clothed as he'd always been. But now, long, lightly muscled arms and even longer, strong yet wiry legs were all Bucky could see. Wet, dark, clean hair fell in loose, attractive curls around his unchanged and perfect face. 

Bucky slumped into the chair at his tiny table before his knees got embarrassingly weak. 

"Feeling better?" he asked.

"I am. Thank you. This place is still vile, though." 

"So," Bucky said. He wasn't sure where to start. "You don't seem that surprised to see me."

"Should I be?" Loki sat across from him in the other chair. "I mean, beyond the incredible coincidence of finding myself in your path."

"I meant," Bucky said, as a way of restating his question, "it's kind of been awhile."

"I could have sworn more time had passed than this, but I find you still young and hale, so it cannot have been very long. In truth, I find you much more hale than I remember. Were you this…" Loki gestured at Bucky in lieu of choosing an adjective. "…when last we fought together?"

"Loki. That was seventy years ago." 

"Really?" Loki asked, mildly surprised, the way someone might be to realize it was dinner time instead of only happy hour. 

Bucky didn't respond. He just stared, slack-jawed and unimpressed until Loki was shamed into believing him. 

It was all coming back to Bucky. He remembered now that a staunch refusal to engage with his bullshit had always been the most surefire way of keeping Loki in check.

"So, I was right!" Loki said next, missing the point entirely. "Didn't I tell you, over and over again, despite your denials, that you had been changed? I could sense it on you, practically smell it on you. The experiments they performed on you changed the fundament of what you are. I told you that you possessed the strength and longevity of the Aesir, did I not? And now, I find my theories proven beyond question. You are completely unchanged, except in all the ways that might be considered an improvement—the very picture of an Aesir warrior." Loki finished with an appraising glance at Bucky's muscular body, taller and broader and thicker than it had been during the war. "You are now even more like…"

And then, inexplicably, Loki looked terribly, tragically depressed. His whole posture, usually so perfect, slumped. 

"You okay?" Bucky asked.

"No."

It was clear that Bucky had better move on to another subject, or, at least, back to his original one. "What I was trying to ask is why _you_ look the same. Loki, it's been seventy years, and tonight you fell out of the sky on the other side of the world from where I last saw you. You ought to be dead, for a lot of different reasons."

"You never did believe me," Loki said accusingly. 

"Believed that you were a Norse god from the planet Asgard? No, I didn't."

"Perhaps it's time to reconsider."

"Yeah, looks like it."

"Perhaps you can reconsider while you get me something to eat and drink? It's been something of a long day, as you can probably imagine. I will need to fortify if you expect me to provide explanations. You know explanations have never been my strong suit."

As he listened, Bucky tamped down the urge to hug the dramatic, long-winded, pompous lug. He'd always wanted to hug Loki (and more) but Loki had never seemed like the kind of guy who went in for that sort of thing. Haughty, aloof, and teasing, he had always avoided sentiments. Which was just as well, because the sentiments Bucky had spent most of Loki's visits during the war repressing would only have gotten him an extra ration of teasing. 

Some of Bucky's feelings must have shown on his face as he busied himself in the kitchen area, because Loki asked, "What is it?"

"Nothing. I just missed you, is all." 

"I know it may not seem it, but… likewise. I did not consciously choose to come here tonight, but I cannot think of another place, or another person, that I would have preferred." After that—the most openly sentimental, yet still nonsensical, thing he'd ever said—Loki cleared his throat and sounded apologetic, for him, at least, when he said, "I missed our appointment." 

"You mean the one where you were finally gonna meet Steve and the rest of my team? The one where we had a chance of stopping Zola for good? The one where you said you had ideas on how to stop a train? The one you promised to come back for in a few days?"

Loki remained statuesquely still, but guilt squirmed across his face. "Yes, that one. Did it, ah, go well?"

Bucky had never had an opportunity to talk about it before, but he learned tonight that he could laugh about it. A second ago he'd felt something like anger—not directed at Loki, not really—threatening to escape the bottle he'd sealed so right, but now he burst into laughter. He laughed until tears stung his eyes. "Couldn't have gone worse, pal." 

Just as Bucky was starting to remember Loki's quirks and tells, Loki must have been remembering Bucky's. He must have known how rare it was for Bucky to veer into hysteria. Slowly, calmly, he ventured, "There is more to this story, I take it?"

"Yeah. There is." Bucky stopped laughing just as abruptly as he'd begun. He placed two glasses of water on the table, along with a pizza he'd brought home from the restaurant. "I wish you'd shown up that day."

"Oh." Loki drank the entirety of his water in a short set of glugs. "I was detained, and then my fa… _Odin_ informed me that he'd discovered my jaunts down to… I was forbidden from continuing to seek out the cube. And by the time the supervisions had been lifted again, I thought too much time had passed, that perhaps I'd been wrong about your longevity and would return to find you too…" Loki trailed off. "I should have come."

Bucky couldn't decide if he felt relieved or resentful that Loki had left out the other, more obvious reason why he hadn't come that day. The elephant in the room. 

"It's all right. No hard feelings. I'm just glad I got to see you again." Bucky watched Loki pick at the pizza in front of him, the same way he'd always picked at his food. "It's safe. It's good. I made it myself." 

"Is that supposed to be reassuring?" Loki asked, even as he brought the slice to his face. 

Watching him eat, Bucky felt as though no time had passed. Loki's always-unexpected visits, wafer-dry sense of humor, and nonstop sarcasm had always managed to jerk Bucky out of the perma-funk in which he'd existed after Azzano. A funk made of fear and horror at what he suspected (correctly, it turned out) was going on with his body. Not even Steve had been able to help, but Loki always had. Bucky hadn't seen Loki since then, but here they were, falling into the old rhythms that they'd honed over a few adventures. 

"So, are you gonna tell me?" Bucky pressed while he watched Loki eat. "Tell me where you've been for seventy years, why you look the same, and why you fell out of the sky tonight."

"This would all be so much easier if you had paid serious attention before." Another evasion.

"I paid attention then. I just didn't believe you. I'll believe you now. I promise." 

"I hardly know where to begin."

From the way Loki's hand trembled, Bucky guessed that whatever had happened to him had been pretty bad, and that explaining might tax him even more than the climb up the bluff.

"Just take it from the top," Bucky replied, shaking a little, too. Under the table, he wrapped his feet around Loki's left leg. "We've got all night."

* * *

During the war, Bucky had regarded Loki's stories about himself as a humorously whimsical cover story. Fanciful yarns wrapped up in a sexy accent. The kind of bullshit a master spy with a sense of humor might spin to someone like Bucky, whose skills warranted a high-caliber partner, but whose clearance wasn't actually very high. If everything Loki told him had to be a lie, at least he'd lied entertainingly. Bucky had spent more time taking advantage of the opportunity to stare at Loki's lips than he had listening to the crazy-sounding content. 

But tonight, he listened, and he took it seriously. He stared at Loki's fidgeting fingers instead of his face in order to guarantee full focus. 

The fidgets were uncharacteristically violent enough that Bucky guessed Loki had never vocalized his story either. And yeah, maybe it was fresher than his own, but it sounded like Loki was also going through some shit. _Bizarre_ shit, with boxes made of winter and rainbows that were literal bridges. 

Bucky wouldn't have been able to believe it when they'd last seen one another, but enough had happened to him since then that, these days, he could believe just about anything. People falling into comas that nobody seemed worried about? Sure. Magic hammers? Okay. Even if he hadn't seen Loki fall from the sky with his own eyes, Bucky could believe the universe might be as big as Loki's words suggested. 

Bucky _wanted_ to believe it, if only because it made Hydra seem that much smaller and more insignificant. 

And so, with unexpected simplicity, he did.

(Though he wasn't sure how he felt about the whole knifing-your-birth-father part. Loki's motivations and plans on that front—throughout, honestly—hadn't really tracked.)

One detail, towards the end, made him so happy that he immediately felt guilty for getting so excited about what was obviously a traumatic predicament for Loki. 

"So, if the Bifrost is broken," Bucky said hopefully, "that means you're stuck here, right? You won't disappear the way you always did."

"I am yours for as long as you will host me in your hovel. The pathways I used to take to visit you relied on tendrils from the Bifrost. They will not work now. And it would take magic that I doubt even the All-Father possesses to summon me back. Not that they would want to. They never wanted me before, not really. They certainly won't now."

"I don't know about that," Bucky said, because, for all that Loki was a difficult bastard, _he_ couldn't imagine not wanting him. Hell, he'd kept wanting him even when he'd doubted that Loki had ever existed. His family would have to care, no matter what he'd done. "But you're welcome to stay as long as you like. You know you are."

Loki reached across the table and tapped Bucky's left hand, covered in its sleeve. "Tell me about this. This is… This is a lie, is it not?"

Bucky peeled the flesh sleeve off to reveal the whole arm. Loki's eyes went wider with every additional inch of metal that gleamed in the lamplight. 

"You're not the only monster here. You might wanna revise that thing about me being 'hale' and 'improved'."

Loki coughed and drank out of Bucky's water glass, having long finished his own. "Ah. No. Not at all." 

"Flattery—" 

"I am no flatterer," Loki interrupted. "You ought to know that." He leaned back in his chair, which pushed his long legs even farther into Bucky's space, until they were intimately tangled together. "I've bored you with my story," he said, as though anyone could have found all that boring. "Now, tell me yours."

Bucky opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Bucky knew it wasn't fair of him to have asked Loki, who was the most private person he had ever met, to bare everything to him, and then find himself unable to reciprocate. But he couldn't. He flapped his gums a few times before giving up. He wanted to tell Loki, to solidify their friendship by demonstrating this kind of trust, but it was as though the still-traumatized part of him had curled up into a protective ball. 

Loki was frowning at him, like he was working something out. Bucky's freakout must have been painfully obvious, because Loki had never sounded as gentle as he did when he said, "You don't have to."

"I want to," Bucky tried to explain. "I just… I've written it down. I could let you read…"

"If it would be easier for you, I could see for myself. If you would let me in. I know my word counts for very little, even with you, but I do promise not to harm you, nor to pry further than you want me to see. I would let you direct my exploration through your mind."

"What are you talking about?" 

Loki leaned over the table and waved his hands in front of Bucky's face. A flash of green and white sparkled between them. "Magic. I thought you had been paying attention this time."

Bucky had never thought he'd want anyone else in his head, but he found himself nodding at the suggestion. Probably because he didn't fully understand it. Or maybe he was just distracted by the light show, because, yeah, he'd been listening, and had decided to believe, but the idea of _magic_ still took some getting used to. 

"Okay," he said. "Go for it."

"Really?" Loki sounded surprised.

"I know we didn't know each other for that long, and you never stayed for more than a couple of days at a time, but… I felt like I knew you. I trust you. With me, anyway. Probably not for much else, though. No offense."

Loki had mostly kept a straight face even while relating the experience of discovering that he was the proverbial monster hiding under the bed. But now, at something like a compliment, his pale features crumpled in something like pain.

"None taken." Loki stood up held a hand out to Bucky. "This will be easier if we sit on the bed."

Bucky didn't know exactly what he'd signed up for, but he let Loki maneuver him until he was sitting with his back against the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him on the bed. Loki knelt over him, knees spread out on either side of his legs. Like this, he was close enough for Bucky to smell the tangy, burned smell he'd gotten a whiff of when the skies had opened earlier. The smell of magic, he was now coming to understand.

Magic, of all the fucking things. 

Loki pressed his hand against Bucky's head. "This will work even if you don't relax, but it would please me if you could. Remember, you are the driver. Show me whatever you think I need to see, but which you find yourself unable to vocalize." 

Bucky closed his eyes. Staying firmly away from anything that involved his feelings about Loki, the feelings that were bubbling up again from this close contact, he started from the beginning—from the train mission. He could feel Loki in his mind, but instead of a violation, the magic, or whatever it was, gave him the sense of a friend holding his hand through all the worst moments of his life. That hand squeezed tighter and more reassuringly the farther they went. However, despite the reassurance, Bucky decided to take a shortcut. Watching five assassinations was as good as fifty; Loki would get the point. So, he skipped ahead, to the days before his escape, when they'd been planning to transfer the Winter Soldier from the Siberian facility to one in Washington D.C. The hand relaxed a little after that, almost tickling in delight at the clever maneuvers and fake-outs that Bucky had used to finally reach Phuket, and from there, his beautiful island haven.

When Bucky opened his eyes, he felt that they were wet, and he saw that Loki's face had moved very close to his own. His palm moved from Bucky's forehead to caress his cheeks, his jaw. He wiped the tears off Bucky's face. 

"I should not have let anything, not even Odin, keep me from you that day."

"It's not your fault. It's all right."

"It's anything but all right."

"I'm better now. I remember things. I remembered you. I keep tabs on Hydra, and I know Hydra hasn't been able to keep tabs on me. No one's come after me. It's… It's better than I thought I'd get."

"It should never have happened," Loki argued, furious, mostly with himself. "I should have been there to—" 

"It's okay. I know why you didn't come back. I wouldn't have come back either, if someone had shut me down the way I shut you down you the last time. In the hayloft. I'd have been too embarrassed. Sorry about that, by the way."

"Don't be. I should not have presumed. I only thought, from the way you sometimes looked at me…" Loki said, still touching Bucky's face, still too close. "It was wishful thinking. I pretended I kept coming back in order to retrieve the cube, but..."

During the war, people had called Bucky brave. They'd given him medals for acts of valor that, if anyone had asked him, had simply been acts of boneheaded loyalty to Steve. They'd praised him, behind closed doors, for bravery in missions too secret to acknowledge with medals; but Bucky had never thought hiding up a tree and shooting people counted as brave. 

He'd never considered himself brave back then, but tonight, tonight he thought he might be. 

"It wasn't wishful thinking," he said, confessing what he'd always fantasized about saying if Loki had come back, one more time. Not that he probably would have been able to get it out back then. "I was just scared. People back then didn't… It wouldn't have been safe. But I did want. You weren't reading it wrong."

"And now?"

Laughing a little, Bucky looked down at his crotch, which, like when they'd been on the scooter, was reacting to Loki's nearness and touch. "What do you think?"

"I am not what you once believed me to be. I am not a British adventurer spy with an active imagination. I am not even the Aesir prince I kept trying to convince you I was. I am—"

"You're back. That's good enough for me."

Loki leaned in and kissed Bucky on the cheek. Then on his left eyelid. Then on his forehead. Then on the chin. He peppered Bucky's face for what felt like minutes, kissing everywhere but his lips. It took Bucky awhile to realize that Loki was leaving the last move to him. As soon as he figured it out, he pulled Loki by the hips to bring him even closer, until he was sitting firmly in Bucky's lap, chest to chest. Bucky tilted his head and finally, _finally_ took what Loki had offered him so long ago in that hayloft in Germany. 

Bucky had believed Loki's wild story about aliens and magic. Hell, he'd just been on the receiving end of that magic, and had seen the light show in the sky. However, it was the delicious coolness of Loki's mouth that made the whole 'abducted prince of an ice planet magically disguised as prince of some other planet' thing feel real. Bucky leaned in harder, trying to chase something that wasn't running away. Loki responded to the aggression with a low moan, which made Bucky pull him in even more roughly. He could feel Loki's growing arousal knocking awkwardly—amazingly—against his own. 

Bucky hadn't made time with anyone since escaping Hydra, and, as Loki now knew, he'd never been brave enough to make time with a man. He didn't know what he was doing when he scooted down the bed, holding firmly onto Loki's hips as he did, but he did it anyway, until he was lying on his back with Loki pressed against him. They didn't come up for air except to help Loki wrestle his shirt off. And that was when Bucky registered that _everything_ about Loki was just as deliciously cool as his lips and his tongue and his mouth. 

"Tell me what you want," Loki whispered.

"This is pretty good, for now, just touching like this. You feel so good," Bucky said. He wanted more, he did, but even this felt like so _much_ after so long without anything. Any more, and he might drown. "But later, tomorrow, maybe… If you're still here."

"I'm not going anywhere."

* * *

They ended up going farther. 

Bucky learned a lot of things about himself. He learned that a lick to the place where his prosthetic met his armpit triggered a mis-wired nerve ending that went straight to his cock. He learned that he liked the torture of being kissed everywhere around his cock except _on_ it. He learned that the serum had left him with absolutely no refractory period. He learned that he liked the taste of himself on someone else's tongue. 

He learned things about Loki, too. He learned that Loki was ticklish on the back of his knees. He learned that Loki was a biter when he came, and that he'd keep on coming for as long as someone petted his hair. He learned that Loki had a thing for triceps and absolutely no gag reflex. 

So, yeah, they ended going kind of a lot farther than the shirtless kissing Bucky had originally thought was his limit. But it was Bucky who took each step to more, who kept pushing them forward. It was Bucky who kept discovering that he was ready, and that he didn't actually need to take it slow.

When they finally rolled off each other, panting and only partially sated, it was Bucky who reached for Loki's hand.

"My first thought was that my landing here had been the most extraordinary coincidence," Loki said, out of nowhere. "But now… I have my suspicions as to the extent of said coincidence. Perhaps the void is not quite as chaotic as we always assumed. Perhaps it honed onto something, sensed for people and places that might bring me comfort, and directed me thither. To you." 

"Or maybe it knew that seeing you would bring _me_ comfort. Not everything's about you, you know."

"It isn't?" Loki asked with mock surprise. 

"I can't wait to show you the island tomorrow," Bucky said. "It's really beautiful here."

"What do you want to show me first?"

Bucky thought. "I was thinking we could grab a drink at the place where I work. It's my night off, but my boss said I should come meet some friends of his. They could meet you, too." 

"As you like."

**Author's Note:**

> The French Bakery Pizzeria is a real place. As is the weird restaurant hanging off a cliff. :D


End file.
